Hamilton's Ferrari engineer saga shows what Verstappen risks with Hart in Austin

As GPblog reported in Verstappen to miss Lambiase for three Grands Prix after emotional Singapore win, Tom Hart will take over as his race engineer from Gianpiero Lambiase in Austin, Brazil and Las Vegas. Lambiase has done the job since the Dutchman joined Red Bull.

The timing matters. In Singapore, Verstappen secured his second consecutive win of the season and the 73rd of his career, following his win at the Bahrain Grand Prix, which was moved to Sepang. That victory came with a broken radio, which Lambiase got around with the code GPblog described in Lambiase comes up with genius solution to Verstappen's radio fails in Singapore GP.

Hamilton knows what it's like to lose a long-term radio partner. After 12 years with Peter 'Bono' Bonnington as the voice in his ear at Mercedes, Hamilton had to adjust to a new race engineer in Riccardo Adami in his first season at Ferrari. That difficult first season was one in which he failed to score a grand prix podium for the team.

Ferrari moved Adami to another role in January. Carlo Santi, who used to engineer Kimi Raikkonen, came in as a stopgap. At testing in Bahrain in February, Hamilton told Sky Sports that he did not like the idea of working with one engineer for a few races and then switching to another.

In the end, the second change Hamilton feared never happened and there are no plans to make any changes to Hamilton's engineer, who he calls "the Italian Bono". Santi then guided him to his first Ferrari win at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix.

Hamilton said the connection clicked almost immediately: "We didn't know each other, we'd never spoken and I didn't really know much of… I didn't know anything about him. And we met and I think got on straight away."

Verstappen's plan is the kind of setup Hamilton called detrimental. Hart is set to work with Verstappen in Austin, Sao Paulo and Las Vegas, while Lambiase returns for Mexico City, Qatar and Abu Dhabi before leaving the team. That means a change of voice on the radio at five race weekends in a row, while Verstappen is fighting at the front.

Red Bull does have one big advantage that Hamilton didn't. Hamilton started from scratch with Santi, but Hart knows the four-time world champion well: he worked closely with him for years as his performance engineer.

Hamilton's year shows that the right engineer can change a season, while a bad match can hold a driver back. Austin will give the first real sign of which way the Verstappen and Hart partnership is heading.